Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to compiler optimization, and more particularly to generating executable files based on optimized object files.
Description of the Related Art
With developments of computer technologies, there have been proposed a large number of programming languages. In software developments, developers first write source code in source files in a programming language, and then the source code are compiled into object files. Usually, compiling a source file involves a number of processing steps. For example, front-end processing may comprise lexical analysis, syntax analysis, semantic analysis, intermediate code generation, and the like; while back-end processing involves code optimization and code generation. Therefore, it might take considerable time to compile the source files.
Compilers play very critical roles to improve the runtime performance of various applications today. Once all source files have been compiled separately into object files, the compiler links the object files into a single file to generate an executable file. To gain a better runtime performance, high level optimizations are used in the compiler.